Holding on {{ FIRSTNAME | there }}? Just a few days ago, a plane's window popped out mid-flight, and a man got halfway sucked out of the plane. The thing that saved him? His seatbelt, of course. And the fellow passengers who caught him and helped pull him back inside. 😳 Sweet dreams.

Send this to a friend who never wears their seatbelt on a plane.

In This Open Letter:

Marking is the single biggest source of stress for SA teachers, and it swallows their weekends whole. So this local AI platform grades a full class's exams in mere minutes…

SA teachers face quite a few structural challenges: Overcrowded classrooms, a lack of resources and language barriers. But in day-to-day work, marking homework, tests and papers is by far their biggest admin burden.

Why? Well, in SA, teachers spend an average of 7.1 hours marking work (double the global average) because of those self-same large class sizes, language barriers (many SA students aren't taught in their mother tongue), and the CAPS curriculum, which requires way more school-based assessments than most other curricula.

Bringing home the pain

It's a pain that SA founder Jakobus Kits felt acutely because his wife is a teacher. And, more often than not, he'd have to watch her disappear into a pile of marking sheets, sometimes for nights on end.

So he roped in brother Jelte Kits to build out the solution…

The platform marking all exams in ten minutes

EduFlare is an AI marking platform for SA schools and universities. It can take handwritten answer sheets and mark them against a teacher or lecturer's memo to return an entire class' marked papers and individual, per-question feedback per pupil in under ten minutes.

A teacher builds the memo once, setting leniency and strictness, and that same standard is applied to every single paper.

EduFlare isn't setting out to replace the teacher. The AI serves as a co-grader, and the teacher can verify every mark if they choose. It's designed to get the marking 90% of the way there, not to be a robot examiner.

The long game

It's still early days, and school budget cycles run long, but they've already got a couple of schools on pilots, with the big mission being to help under-resourced schools with credible, trackable marks.

We like it because we don't believe AI should replace teachers. But teaching is full of tasks that eat hours, are necessary to the process, and add far less to a child's learning than direct contact time does. Marking of papers is the worst of them all.

And usually, an EdTech problem is adoption: school bureaucracy moves slowly. But we're yet to meet a teacher who enjoys marking, so if this solution spreads bottom-up, teacher to teacher, it could move like wildfire.

We're watching this space…

Most internal newsletter attempts die within three months. We get it: It’s not your business’s main thing; creating content is hard, and learning how to do email well takes time.

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From the client side?

You just approve, check a test send and watch the numbers climb.

4 copywriting tricks for LinkedIn that actually work. One of SA's most experienced LinkedIn operators gave us four powerful formulas that help you write posts that drive engagement and get shared. Read the full breakdown.

Claude now tells you how to use it. The new Reflections feature (in settings) analyses how you and your team interact with Claude, so you can optimise your workflows and build better skills around it. Check it out.

This Friday: Get better results from Google Ads. An SA agency founder unpacks Performance Max, budget waste and how to turn paid media into a useful growth system, not a vanity dashboard. 17 July, 12 pm. Founder Collab members only. Join to get access.

🛢️ SA's First Oil Stockpile Since Apartheid. South Africa plans to increase its strategic oil reserves for the first time since the 1970s, when UN sanctions drove the construction of the 45-million-barrel Saldanha Bay hub. The government estimates 10 million barrels are needed to close the current shortfall. Well, better late than never.

📺 Free Streaming for Africa. Days after SA free-to-air broadcaster eTV announced a deal with Netflix, its parent company eMedia launched a new African free streaming service called Openview Stream in 7 countries (but not SA). Keep an eye on these guys.

✈️ Africa's Best Lounge. SA's Bidvest Premier Lounge at OR Tambo has been ranked the best airport lounge in Africa in the 2026 Priority Pass Excellence Awards, based on 700k+ reviews. Nice, but what about the rest of our airports? All the lounges should be Africa's best.

🏬 Where Are All the Walmarts? After rolling out 3 stores between Nov '25 and Feb '26, there have been no new Walmart openings in SA. Some reckon they might convert Game stores instead. Do what you gotta do, we want our Walmarts.

🏆 Engagement That Converts. Studio 88 used WhatsApp competitions to turn attention into action. Chat Inc drove 83% read rates, 23% button clicks and converted nearly 6% of clickers into competition entries. Want that kind of engagement?*

* From our partners. Find all the best service providers for your business in our Founder Stack.

Yesterday, we showed you TaxTim’s new TimAI tax assistant on WhatsApp, asking what you're doing with your SARS refund. Most here are gonna squirrel it away…

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 💸 Straight into savings, I'm an adult now (53%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🫠 I've already spent it in my mind (11%)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛠️ Something boring but responsible (new tyres, ugh) (21%)

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🛋️ The couch I've been threatening to buy for two years (0%)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ 🤡 What refund? I owe them money (15%)

Your 2 cents…

Hmm, lekke tip, Wynand, we taking notes here. 📝

On 14 July 1965, NASA's Mariner 4 performed the first successful fly-by of Mars and sent back the first photographs of another planet from deep space.

The images revealed extensive cratering and a barren surface, not quite the lush alien world some had hoped for. But it was the first time humanity saw the actual surface of another planet up close.

🧩 Tool to Try: MeetingFriends compares everyone's calendars to find the best times for your group to meet up.

🌍 That's Interesting: In 2013, a Cape Town man survived treading water for 28 hours after falling overboard. He encountered a shark, was stung by jellyfish and attacked by gulls before being rescued. Built different.

🎨 Next Level: Norway's out of the Cup now, but when they beat Brazil, the army did this celebration video.

🕹️ Wow Site: Anthropocene Timeline shows you the key events in our technological era.